Here’s a mainstream novel with speculative fiction elements rather than a science-fiction novel for a change. It’s the newest book by Emily St. John Mandel who was already a bestselling writer but received a massive boost in popularity recently for obvious reasons as her 2014 novel was set during a pandemic. I chose to read this one first as I was more intrigued by its multiple timelines and thought it would appeal to my science-fiction preferences more. In the end I found this to be an exceedingly pleasant book to read but most of all, it reminds me of the essential differences between mainstream literature and science-fiction. The book is full of time travel but as an author Mandel has no interest in the concept of time travelling at all. She uses it as a narrative device to offer some humanistic insights that are admittedly interesting but also reinforce the universal and unchanging nature of humanity even as time passes and science advances.
This is the third book of the Culture series and once again Iain M. Banks surprises me with how different it is from the previous two books. The first book showed the Culture from the perspective of its enemies. The second provided a look at a typical citizen of the Culture who is asked to help treat with another civilization. This one is again a story from the perspective of someone who is not born of the Culture and works for them as a sort of mercenary as part of their Special Circumstances organization. While there is a wider plot, the novel is largely a deep dive into the psyche of its protagonist. Personally while I commend the ambition and sophistication of this approach, I can’t say that I liked this novel terribly much as I don’t find examining the tortured minds of ex-soldiers that appealing and I question why the Culture needs to employ such people for their needs.
I try to read a diverse selection of science-fiction but one of the biggest holes in my reading are the works of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. He is indisputably one of the greats of the genre and Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of his Solaris is one of the greatest films of all time. I chose not to begin with that as it seems a little obvious and I have already watched two adaptations of the novel. The Invincible isn’t as well known but I have read about how it’s eerily prescient about some science-fiction tropes that would become commonplace only much later.
This anthology has an interesting backstory in that it started out as an audiobook project that was only published as a written book as something of an afterthought. This is also a shared world project as the five different writers including editor John Scalzi worked together to create a world about rebuilding civilization after an ecological and economic collapse and then each wrote a story set in it. The appeal of this is immediately obvious to someone like me, especially as I’m always on the lookout for stories that purport to show what a post-capitalist utopia might look like on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately I found this collection to be mostly a disappointment, filled with the usual shallow critiques of capitalism and a description of the economic activities of the post-revolutionary world that feels oddly old-fashioned now only some ten years after it was published.
It’s been a while since I sat down and read a proper non-fiction book. It’s not that I’m uninterested, it’s just that I read so much non-fiction online already that I don’t feel the need to do so to generally stay on top of current events and discoveries. This book however has been talked about so much among the economists whose blogs I keep up on that I felt compelled to buy it and really history is one of the subjects that it is better to read a proper book about than gain knowledge about through osmosis. Do note that I’m dispensing with the subtitle that is always so annoyingly long in modern non-fiction books and the author Steven Johnson is not himself a historian but a popular science author so this book is aimed at the mass market.
I’m taking a pause in my reading of The Wandering Inn for a while and catching up on other stuff. Worth the Candle is another work of online fiction that is now fully complete by a writer who goes by the name Alexander Wales. I read Wales’ fanfiction years ago and he is considered one of the writers who arose in the community around Eliezer Yudkowsky’s HPMOR but I haven’t been following up with what he has been doing recently. Well, this was what he was working on and at around 1.6 million words, it’s a pretty hefty epic. It seems to be moderately successful and the image I use here is taken from an approved translation of the work into the Korean language called This World I Made. As for what it’s about, on the face of it, it’s yet another entry into the crowded isekai genre but actually it is a very meta-fictional exploration of fantasy worlds and I think semi-autobiographical on the part of the writer.
One can expect to see a Robert Reed short story in any decent science-fiction anthology but I’ve never been a particular fan of his work and I’ve never read any of his longer form writing. Then I read his story Good Mountain in The Very Best of the Best, liked it, realized that it’s part of a wider shared universe and so here I am. This is a compilation of stories about a gigantic ship that roams the galaxy, arranged in rough chronological order. This means however that the stories in here take place very early in the history of the ship while Good Mountain must take place much, much later, so much so that they don’t even feel that they belong in the same world at all. That, sadly, is just one reason why I don’t much care for this book at all.
